According to a report in The Wall Street Journal, Google is growing increasingly concerned with Samsung's dominance of the Android - and smartphone - landscape. Supposedly, the topic is being openly discussed at Google, and as far as I'm concerned, that's great news.
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Member since:2005-07-06
I also have a Galaxy S which I upgraded to Jelly Bean with CyanogenMod. I found that although speed was greatly improved and the constant crashes and hangs of applications stopped, the battery consumption went up dramatically. It would not last through the day if I had wi-fi or mobile internet enabled (turning these off made it last considerably longer). CyanogenMod developers have said that this is a persistent problem with Samsung S-series devices. I suspect that the application problems were down to them being optimised for ICS or JB because they had not always been happening (and I had not had an OS upgrade since getting the phone in mid-2011) and stopped when I upgraded.
The GS was quite hard-wearing though. I was tempted to buy a Motorola Defy because of its claims of supposed indestructability (which have been shown to be groundless), but this phone survived at least two drops onto hard surfaces. I never cared about the camera - I have a proper camera for taking pictures. I replaced the GS with a Galaxy Nexus this month.
Member since:2006-05-18
Member since:2006-07-15
What ? I have a Samsung Galaxy S also , bought 2 years ago.
It still doesnt have a scratch. Camera, screen, cover is like new. ( i just bough a 10€ cover for it, white brand )
I have CM with 4.2.2 in it, running great (helly rom). I also have a Nexus 7, and the two android systems are running great.
Also speed wise, if i dont put alot of Bloaty apps on it, it runs very well.
Dont know what more would anyone want from a phone : Durability, Battery still good, probably the phone that has more ROM's not being a Nexus.
Makes me think that i dont have no reason to buy another android phone in the near or not so near future.
"In NixOS, the entire operating system - the kernel, applications, system packages, configuration files, and so on - is built by the Nix package manager from a description in a purely functional build language. The fact that it's purely functional essentially means that building a new configuration cannot overwrite previous configurations. Most of the other features follow from this." Interesting approach. A Linux distribution, sure, but with some very refreshing ideas about system configuration.
Google added, among other features, C/C++ support to its new version of AIDE. From Android-IDE, "Now you can write parts of your app or your whole app in C/C++ on your device. AIDE supports the Standard Android NDK toolchain (GCC 4.6 + Bionic, STL, ...). No changes are necessary if you want to build an app developed on a PC with Eclipse. C/C++ development is fully integrated: Build errors appear in the error list and files can easily be navigated to with Go to file. The editor supports C/C++ syntax highlighting."
Ars nails it: "The answer is that Google did announce what amounts to a fairly substantial Android update yesterday. They simply did it without adding to the update fragmentation problems that continue to plague the platform. By focusing on these changes and not the apparently-waiting-in-the-wings update to the core software, Google is showing us one of the ways in which it's trying to fix the update problem."
"It is good for programmers to understand what goes on inside a processor. The CPU is at the heart of our career. What goes on inside the CPU? How long does it take for one instruction to run? What does it mean when a new CPU has a 12-stage pipeline, or 18-stage pipeline, or even a 'deep' 31-stage pipeline? Programs generally treat the CPU as a black box. Instructions go into the box in order, instructions come out of the box in order, and some processing magic happens inside. As a programmer, it is useful to learn what happens inside the box. This is especially true if you will be working on tasks like program optimization. If you don't know what is going on inside the CPU, how can you optimize for it? This article is about what goes on inside the x86 processor's deep pipeline."
"It was the only moment I heard regret slip into Otellini's voice during the several hours of conversations I had with him. 'The lesson I took away from that was, while we like to speak with data around here, so many times in my career I've ended up making decisions with my gut, and I should have followed my gut,' he said. 'My gut told me to say yes.'" The world would've been a much different place - Apple would have been less dependant on Samsung for its chips, which probably would've meant less money for Samsung to develop its Galaxy business.Glass is getting some love at Google I/O as well. New applications have been released - Facebook, Twitter, Evernote, Elle, Tumblr, and CNN. Perhaps more interesting: the newly announced Google Glass Developer Kit will allow offline applications and direct hardware access - great for hacking and expanding Glass' potential. This kit will really allow hackers to put Glass through its paces.
"But Beck and Merrill decided that simply banning toxic players wasn't an acceptable solution for their game. Riot Games began experimenting with more constructive modes of player management through a formal player behavior initiative that actually conducts controlled experiments on its player base to see what helps reduce bad behavior. The results of that initiative have been shared at a lecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and on panels at the Penny Arcade Expo East and the Game Developers Conference." Absolutely fascinating stuff. I'm a League of Legends player, and to be honest, the community isn't nearly as bad as some make it out to be. I'm happy Riot games has the guts to employ science to address the issue."Android and iOS, the number one and number two ranked smartphone operating systems worldwide, combined for 92.3% of all smartphone shipments during the first quarter of 2013 as Windows Phone crept past BlackBerry for 3rd place. According to the International Data Corporation Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker, Android smartphone vendors and Apple shipped a total of 199.5 million units worldwide during 1Q13, up 59.1% from the 125.4 million units shipped during 1Q12." Windows Phone doubles from a few to twice few, iOS loser market share as its growth is slower than that of the overall market. BlackBerry continues slide into irrelevance."According to the latest research from our Wireless Smartphone Strategies service, global Android smartphone profits reached US$5 billion in total during the first quarter of 2013. Samsung dominated and captured an impressive 95 percent share of all Android smartphone profits." Wow."During its Keynote today, Google announced new features coming to its flagship search function - you know, that thing we all started using Google for. VP Amit Singhal spent some time discussing what Google's search functionality will eventually morph into. Google's strategy is summarized by three words: answer, converse, and anticipate. Singhal explained that many of the pieces of these upcoming changes can already be seen in products that Google has recently introduced - namely, Google Knowledge Graph and Google Now, with perhaps a splash of Google Glass, too." I hold on to my hat every time Google changes Search. It's such a vital product in my daily life.
Member since:
2006-05-18
I bought a Galaxy S two years ago and I'm never buying a Samsung Phone ever again. The updates were horrible, and Samsung can't be bothered to update past 2.3.6. They even said that the device wasn't able to run anything newer. Well I'm running 4.2.1 on it now.
As for the hardware - the GPS barely works (also a problem on a friend's Galaxy S), the camera's external protection is easily scratched by simply putting and taking the phone out of the pocket, resulting in blurry photos (I had to buy a replacement from eBay).
And don't get me started on Touchwiz which is a total Apple ripoff. The past two years were a constant struggle to make my Android as vanilla as possible (thanks Cyanogenmod).
So, in my experience, Samsung does mediocre hardware, horrible software and doesn't care about its customers.